conf.KDE.in 2014

Me, Shantanu and Smit reached Gandhinagar(Gujarat, India) on 21st Feb 2014. I was almost out of events from 2010 and hence this event was so special for me. On the same day I met Jos Poortvliet and Kevin Ottens. After having dinner our room became the adda ( meaning: place where everyone joined ) where I met Rishab and Shubham .

Day 1: Feb 21 2014

My room mate was Smit and we woke up early. I heard a familiar sound from next room, “Arey shantanu …”. Hey it was our Pradeepto. I felt so good to meet him after 4 years!!! After having some normal chat we were ready for breakfast. I met one of the old friends Prashanth Udupa for breakfast. Prashanth and Shantanu were discussing over Qt workshop for the day. After breakfast we moved to DA-IICT. To be honest its one of the awesome colleges I had ever seen till date. In the registration area I met Peter Grasch. Spent couple of hours there and moved ahead for lunch.

After lunch Pradeepto gave inauguration speech. He did a good job. And then on Prashanth started the Qt workshop. Prashanth kicked off the workshop with small example and went further. During workshop we helped students by fixing the problems they faced. Some had linker issues, GL files missing, fail to compille the code. Many had windows laptop and being a GNU/Linux user I felt bit difficult to tackle some of the issues they faced. But then some of the rockstars of KDE were ready to tackle them. Kudos to team KDE 🙂

After day one event we reached hotel. It was time to have dinner. And we decided to have some pizza’s. Except cold noodles and pasta ( I don’t prefer cold noodles and pasta ) the pizzas served were awesome. After dinner we came back to hotel. Had lots of fun in discussing some of the old stories, politics and what not.

Day 2: Feb 22 2014

Start of day 2 was with Smit’s talk. He shared with students how he got into KDE and how it had helped him in his career. How good KDE community. He also shared example of communities which helped students to understand how easy is to get into KDE community. And hence KDE community isn’t hard as a coconut 🙂 Nikhil gave the second talk on Qt C++ idioms. This was a technical talk. He helped students realize about QPointer, QWeakPointer etc. And hence he did a good job. I had to give the third talk. After 4 years I am on stage. So I was very nervous. I described how I got into KDE community by contributing to Klettres. I also showed students how to find a problem and reach solution for the same. The fourth talk was given by Siteshwar and Shantanu on Mer project. They described how to have a common build system for different mobile vendors. After each talk we got good bunch of questions from audience.

Lunch was provided in the front of the hall ( not exactly in the front 🙂 ).

After lunch, Vishesh got into stage for his talk. His talk helped students to understand that its essential to have knowledge on the underlying technology of the project. He described how he had faced the hurdles while working on Nepomuk. Next talk was delivered by Samikshan. His talk was on how to use KDE edu packages like parley and to learn language using the edu packages. Next talk was given by Sinny on plasma-mediacenter. She showed how plasma-mediacenter was used to play songs,videos etc. She also demonstrated on how plasma-mediacenter was used for viewing youtube videos. She didn’t forget to mention about contributing back to plasma-mediacenter 🙂 Next it was Chandan’s talk on localization. He emphasized more on the tools used for localization.
Next was Shubham’s turn. Shubham described about his SoK experience. Shubham also described how he enjoyed working on KDE Multimedia. The day ended with Kevin’s talk. He described how FOSS works. There were points regarding cultural reasons for its shortcomings and how it can be improvised etc. When everyone emphasized on word “Open Source”, I really loved the way Kevin used word “Free Software”.

The second day’s talks were over and we moved ahead to our hotel rooms. There was already plan made to go out for dinner as a team. It was far away from the hotel and for commute, vehicles were ready. We had lots of PJ’s and fun during the drive. We had kind of Gujarati+Rajasthani style dinner. After dinner we came back to hotel.

Day 3: Feb 23 2014

First talk of the day started with Jos. He helped the audience to understand about how and where KDE is going ahead with KDE5, Plasma 2 etc. There were quite interesting questions form the audience as well. Next talk was by Kevin on C++11. It was purely technical talk on the new changes brought in to C++ like lambda, auto etc. He tried his best showing sample snippet code to students and demonstrating the old way of writing and new style with c++11. Next talk was given by Prashanth on GCF. He explained some of the IPC mechanisms used in GCF and how it can be used in local network.

We had lunch in front of the hall.

Post lunch talk was kicked off with Avnee. Avnee showed how she contributed to KDiamond game during GSoC. She showed about components in QML and how to reuse them. She also showed about custom components which user can create and use them. Next talk was given by Peter. He started of with architectural diagram of Simon. He demonstrated how to play songs in amarok using simon. He also shared ideas on how to integrate simon to specific applications like plasma-mediacenter. Next was Bhushan’s talk on Plasma2. He showed the video of plasma workspace 2. He showed students on development and porting phases of Plasma 2. Next was Rishab’s turn. Rishab demonstrated a bug in kstars UI and how to fix it. He also asked students to file a bug or send a patch to kick off contributing to kstars. I missed Puneet’s talk as I went outside to take snaps. And finally we all gave a big round of applause to the volunteers who were involved in the event.

Me, Shantanu, Smit and Prashant returned back to Bangalore on the same flight. So when I look back at the event I got an opportunity to meet old friends, make new friends, had lot of fun, learned new stuff. I would thank DA-IICT for providing the venue and all speakers and audiences who came. I also give special thank to Digia and VCreate Logic for sponsoring the event. My special thanks to KDE e.V too 🙂